Hilda Lessways | Page 7

as simple in forgiveness as in wrath, did
not disguise her pleasure in the remarkable fact that it was Hilda who
had made the overture. Hilda thought: "How strange I am! What is
coming over me?" She glanced at the range, in which was a pale gleam
of red, and that gleam, in the heavy twilight, seemed to her to be
inexpressibly, enchantingly mournful. And she herself was mournful
about the future-- very mournful. She saw no hope. Yet her sadness
was beautiful to her. And she was proud.

CHAPTER III
MR. CANNON
I
A little later Hilda came downstairs dressed to go out. Her mother was
lighting a glimmer of gas in the lobby. Ere Mrs. Lessways could
descend from her tiptoes to her heels and turn round Hilda said quickly,
forestalling curiosity:
"I'm going to get that thread you want. Just give me some money, will
you?"
Nobody could have guessed from her placid tone and indifferent
demeanour that she was in a state of extreme agitation. But so it was.
Suddenly, after kissing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a
tremendous resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed her,
sending her flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the
assured movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet, mantle, 'fall,'
and gloves in the darkness of the chamber. She held herself in leash
while her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within
and a purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had
shut the door on all that interior haunted by her mother's restlessness,
when she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street,
she yielded with voluptuous apprehension to a thrill that shook her.
"I might have tidied my hair," she thought. "Pooh! What does my hair
matter?"
Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven
years previously, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For
several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying her mother by
complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited.
At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous
dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies
down on the table, had cried, "Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and
buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you'll get what you want!" And the

child, without an instant's hesitation, had seized the coins and gone out,
hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an
eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned
home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by
the boldness of the daughter's initiative, by her amazing, flaunting
disregard of filial decency. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the
episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful
secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably
though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her
daughter aged twenty: "I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her
own lawyer next!" Hilda had understood, and that was why she had
blushed.
And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road,
on her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly
the intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of
its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had
inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a
curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.
II
The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town.
The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a
watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to
which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind
this crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a
large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and
almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the
bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns,
and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within
recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station--rail-head of
a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those parts.
Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find
yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with
iron-and-coal villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the
eternal damnation which was the chief article of their devout religious

belief. And in the Market Square not even the late edition of the
Staffordshire Signal was cried, though it was discreetly on